into the great vestibule of the palace, and in a quivering
voice flung a question at the first lackey he encountered:

"Has His Majesty started yet?"

"Not yet, my lord."

The answer lessened his haste, but not his agitation. He cast off the
heavy wolfskin pelisse in which he had been wrapped, and, leaving it in
the hands of the servant, went briskly up the grand staircase, a tall,
youthful figure, very graceful in the suit of black he wore.

As he passed through a succession of ante-rooms on his way to the
private apartments of the King, those present observed the pallor of his
clean-cut face under the auburn tie-wig he affected, and the feverish
glow of eyes that took account of no one. They could not guess that
Baron Bjelke, the King's secretary and favourite, carried in his hands
the life of his royal master, or its equivalent in the shape of the
secret of the plot to assassinate him.

In many ways Bjelke was no better than the other profligate minions of
the profligate Gustavus of Sweden. But he had this advantage over them,
that his intellect was above their average. He had detected the first
signs of the approach of that storm which the King himself had so
heedlessly provoked. He knew, as much by reason as by intuition, that,
in these days when the neighbouring State of France writhed in the
throes of a terrific revolution against monarchic and aristocratic
tyranny, it was not safe for a king to persist in the abuse of his
parasitic power. New ideas of socialism were in the air. They were
spreading through Europe, and it was not only in France that men
accounted it an infamous anachronism that the great mass of a community
should toil and sweat and suffer for the benefit of an insolent
minority.

Already had there been trouble with the peasantry in Sweden, and Bjelke
had endangered his position as a royal favourite by presuming to warn
his master. Gustavus III desired amusement, not wisdom, from those
about him. He could not be brought to realize the responsibilities which
kingship imposes upon a man. It has been pretended that he was endowed
with great gifts of mind. He may have been, though the thing has been
pretended of so many princes that one may be sceptical where evidence
is lacking. If he possessed those gifts, he succeeded wonderfully in
concealing them under a nature that was frivolously gay, dissolute, and
extravagant.

His extravagance forced him into monstrous extortions when only a
madman